A stream of crimson flowed from your head like a broken tap. I looked down at my hands, where particles of your skin had collected beneath my nails. My palms were shaking. I held them open to the sky like a prayer—except it wasn’t a prayer because I did not fear God. 

⎯

I never anticipated just how easy it would be to kill a person. It’s strange—isn’t it—that someone can be so alive one moment and vanish the next, as if they never even happened? I could handle the stillness, the rigor mortis, even that cold, vacant expression. But the thought of Gwen leaving on her own volition was like a knife to my chest. Weeks after her death, I no longer recognized myself. The hollows of my face were dark and skeletal, like a postmortem bruise and I couldn’t sleep. As for the matter of noise, I needed it perpetually. Whether it was the chatter of talk radio, a running faucet or heavy metal crackling through blown-out headphones, every waking, wordless moment I smothered with sound. It was the unsung details—a crescent stain from her last cup of tea, the spray-tan tinged towels, wrinkled pajamas on the hallway floor and above all, that cadaverous silence. These were the things that reminded me she was truly gone. I made temporary arrangements at a cheap motel nearby so I wouldn’t have to think about her so much.

 

The interrogations were held in a dusky concrete chamber. The impermanence of the blank walls, the folding chairs, and the Detective’s starched khaki uniform suggested we were not two ordinary people, but actors in some bleak and nightmarish play. His accent was thick like molasses and decidedly southern. At first he laid on the charm. Only when his accusations began did I see the artifice of it all and his two-facedness. I was no longer the innocent witness he had described, but a suspect under his scrutiny. Though I answered each question carefully, my composure chipped away. I touched the back of my hand to my forehead and it came away dripping with sweat.

When the Detective asked if I could hand over my ID, I agreed and thumbed through my wallet. A photo of Gwen fluttered out, landing squarely on the steel table between us. I had captured it—the last image taken of her alive—on an old Polaroid Onestep. She’s pictured standing over the stove in our trailer, flipping a pancake that’s perfectly golden and round. Her smile is bright to match; she’s rosy-cheeked, vibrant, innervated. As soon as I touched the crumpled image, an electrified current surged through my body and into the room. The tremor was so intense that I had to hold on to the sides of my chair to stay upright. In the commotion, the photo slipped from my palm and onto the floor face-down. Everything returned to its natural stillness. 

 

My eyes met with the Detective’s. His jaw had gone slack; his irises rotated like pinwheels. With a flat, lifeless tone he ended the interview. I glanced at the clock behind him. It read three on the dot, though I was certain that the last time I checked it had been a quarter to four. That forty-five minute discrepancy, in which time seemed to move backwards, had rewritten the course of the interview so I was freed of suspicion.

 

The Detective’s quiet resignation was triggered as soon as I touched Gwen’s photo. I theorized that her timeworn objects contained some remnant of her, and that had been the reason for his forgetting. I tested my theory on other objects of hers: a blue beaded coinpurse, a ceramic figurine of an angel praying, and a silver heart-shaped pendant. Each proved a similar effect. I unearthed a newfound sense of hopefulness just thinking about the things that could be undone. Despite having the power to destroy any investigative links between myself and Gwen’s murder, I couldn’t escape my own painful recollections.

⎯

The air vibrated with the song of the cicadas. We were drinking Miller Lights on the patio—or maybe, I drank Miller Lights while you just watched. When the Neighbor stopped by, you went over to see him. Etched into the backs of your thighs were the red impressions from the lawn chair. You spun an earring between two fingers, which is what really got to me, or maybe, how you kept glancing over to see if I was in earshot. Whatever you did that night, it sent me into a rage.

⎯

Weeks later, I was still feeling restless and wistful, but as far as the investigation was concerned I seemed to be in the clear. I hadn’t heard a thing about Gwen from anyone—not her friends, or her family. Even the phony Detective was radio-silent. Her name didn’t pop up on the news anymore, and online searches of her name yielded no results. It appeared that she had fallen off the face of the earth entirely. But there was one unexpected complication, that being her spirit starting to materialize in my environment. At first, I wrote it off as paranoia, but then, there she was, stepping off the bus outside our old high school. She was shorter than when I saw her last and her hair was much longer, but I would recognize that beloved Brittany Spears backpack anywhere, the way she wore it slung over one shoulder and her distinctive blonde curls, sandwiched between furry pink earmuffs. I watched her disappear down the sidewalk with a sprightly bounce to her step, the spitting image of Gwen when we first met.

 

As the seasons changed, I would catch glimpses of her more often; peering at me through shop windows, in the audience of an old Price is Right rerun. I even saw her in the garish floral wallpaper at the dentist’s office. My life had metamorphosed into some fucked-up version of Where’s Waldo, but instead of Waldo being the common denominator, it was my ghostly dead girlfriend. Everywhere I went, I was terrified she would be there, waiting.

 

One Friday afternoon, I left work early on account of a migraine that no dosage of tylenol could touch. When I got back to my room, I stumbled into the shower and let the water flow over me as cold as it would go. As I was shaving in the reflection of a little mirror on the wall, I accidentally struck it with my elbow and it came crashing down. The reverberation was stifling, like a firecracker or a gunshot. I looked down to find the tiles below scattered with glittering fragments. 

I bent carefully to gather the pieces in one hand. When I happened to glance into the biggest shard, I gasped and dropped it. In the tiny reflection of it was Gwen’s face, peering back at me, and the resemblance was uncanny. She had those same cerulean orbs for eyes, a lichenous scar branching from the left brow, and that downy, moonwashed skin. I made a naked dash from the room, in my haste slicing a deep gash into the heel of one foot. For the rest of the day, I nursed my injury, wholly refusing to go anywhere near the bathroom.

 

A few hours later, I found myself poring over a newspaper at a diner nearby. The article’s title read: “Where Are You, Gwen? Case of Missing Nevada Woman Reopened.” I scanned over the paragraphs several times, shaking my head in disbelief. It mentioned the FBI’s recruitment in the search for Gwen’s body, and vaguely suggested that they were looking into multiple leads. I had been so sure, so careful to lock each door into the investigation, then throw away the keys, but there it was again in the wrathful bold letters of a newspaper headline. Apparently, a person’s memories can not stay buried for long. 

 

When the Waitress appeared, I nearly jumped out of my seat. In the fifteen minutes it took her to prepare my food, she had completely transformed. Her smile was garishly overdrawn in red lipstick, and her parted lips parted revealed a mouthfull of bestial white teeth—at least fifty crowded into each row. Her eyes were unblinking and seemed to bulge from their sockets. 

 

“Any pie today?” she said. Her voice was tinny and far too upbeat for comfort. I declined and unwrapped my bundle of silverware, only to find that each piece was crusted with brown remains. She brought over the rest of the dishes, at which point I observed a grayish tint to the scrambled eggs and speckles of mold on each of the pancakes. Every last plate was cold to the touch. Strangest of all was when she poured my coffee and the liquid flowed backwards, from mug to pitcher as if in reverse. 

 

“Any pie today? Any pie today? Any pie today?” she chirped. I said no a second time and she hobbled back towards the kitchen. I was so unsettled by that point that I put a twenty on the table and left.

 

When I had first entered the diner on that occasion, it was a sweltering August evening; markedly one of the hottest days of the year. But as soon as I opened the door to leave, less than half an hour later, the dry heat had vanished. I was hit with a freezing gust of wind and  thick layer of crystalline snow obstructing my feet. The sheer magnitude of white powder was blinding and extended as far as the eye could see. I ran the whole distance to the motel, my exposed ankles frostbitten by the time I got back. My body exhausted and shivering, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

 ⎯

Tears rolled down your petal-soft cheeks. Your lips were swollen and chasmically split down the middle. Part of me wanted to go back—back to a time when you were perfect, but another, unrecognizable part wanted to see you tremble. I shook you. I begged you to cough up whatever happened between you and The Neighbor. I gave you one chance, Gwen—one last chance to tell me everything.

 ⎯

When I woke up, the world outside my window was a dark and lifeless void. I tried to stand but found that I was feverish and lacking my usual momentum. When I peeled back the damp, twisted bedsheets, I realized that both of my legs were missing. Each one had been replaced by a smooth, round nub that extended a few inches past the hipbones before tapering off unnaturally. I felt no pain, in fact I was strangely unbothered, as if the conventions of what a body should be had become totally irrelevant.

 

I needed something desparately to drink, so I lowered myself from the bed and slithered out the door, using my forearms to inch closer to the elevator. Once again, the weather had changed, this time from a blistering snowstorm to something like a rainy spring evening. The whole front of my shirt and trailing legs of my sweatpants were quickly soaked with brackish rainwater. 

With the remainder of my pocket change, I bought two cans of Coke from the vending machine downstairs, then drank them both in succession. Satisfied, I started back towards my room, this time by army-crawling up the stairs. When I swiped my card through the key reader, though, I was met with the blinking red indicator light. I cursed and wiggled the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. All of a sudden, the door was opened by someone on the other side. It was an elderly man who, besides a pair of boxers and halo of white fuzz around his head, was utterly naked. He appeared less like a grown man and more like a paunchy, oversized toddler. 

 

“Well, who the fuck are you?” he bellowed, spit flying with every consonant. He peered down at me—at the bizarre, dismembered creature that had turned up on the landing. From the room behind him came the sound of people arguing on TV..

 

“This is my room. See? 2-2-2!” I held up the small paper envelope where my card was kept. The concierge had scribbled my room number on it in thick black sharpie.

 

“Dumbass. That’s 1-1-1,” he said, then slammed the door in my face. I scratched my head, then looked at it again and frowned. He was right. The numbers clearly read ‘1-1-1.’ How could that be? How could I have confused my room for being on the second floor, and not the first?

⎯

I picked up the hammer from the coffee table and swung, sending a clean strike into your occipital region. You hit the floor, and thus began the silence. I had never seen you so still; never heard you so quiet—a crumpled ragdoll splayed out on the rug.

⎯

The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and just knew that another rift in the world’s natural order had been set in motion. My thoughts splintered and terrifying flashes seized my vision. I saw Gwen’s face with the color draining from it at ten-times speed. I saw the Waitress’s Cheshire grin and men in plastic suits shoveling dirt under the light of a floodlamp. Then pieces of me began to fall away—a shorn left ear, a fleshy lung, two detached radial bones. My mind became a whiplash of paper backdrops, and I saw myself in a hellish inferno, a labyrinth with endless passageways and thrashing in the depths of an underwater cave. I flipped through each tableaux, hoping that one of them might be my reality but nothing was the least bit familiar. Just as I was about to give up, I felt the snag of an ephemeral tripwire, tethered between my soul and the physical realm. Although inexplicably paralyzed on the carpet of my motel room, I became rooted in a holy moment of coherence.

 

There was a faint pst-pst coming from the polaroid of Gwen. It lay beside me, just out of reach and I used the last of my strength to maneuver it between two fingers. Her smile had turned sinister, the corners of her mouth devilishly upturned. The whites of her eyes were webbed with angry red vessels. For the first time in months, I heard her voice ring out. She spoke from beyond the silver halide of the polaroid, its gauzy surface the only separation between us.

 

“You thought you could just forget me?  she said, “Didn’t you?” Her tone was different too; deeper and abrasive. “You blamed me for everything but it was you. It was always you. Now, look how pathetic you are.” 

 

Without warning, she lunged, breaking through the photo’s translucent membrane. Her head and shoulders emerged, followed by a frenzy of jumbled limbs. The frame warped and stretched as she maneuvered her body through it, then she flopped onto the floor like a fish out of water. She scrambled to her feet, using the collar of my tee-shirt as leverage and her voice closed in from above. When she spoke, her breath sent an insectile, crawling sensation down my spine.

 

“Now, it’s me who gets to decide.”

 

With three mighty thrusts, she shoved me through the margins of the photo and I was catapulted through. I landed upright, but completely frozen and panned my gaze nauseatingly over the room. It seemed I had departed from the real world and crash-landed into this snapshot version of our trailer. In my periphery, constellations of cockroaches clung to the walls and the counters were piled with empty beer cans and takeout boxes. The room itself was electrified, pulsating with the same energy as my initial meeting with the detective. That seemed like ages ago, the moment when I first realized the malleability of time. Now, it was me in Gwen’s place. In my right hand was the cast iron from the photo, which my body refused to set down. Its handle glowed like molten lava, searing painfully through the skin of my palm. 

 

Floating a few paces away was the disembodied picture frame from whence I came, in the very position I had stood with the camera when I first took that photo of Gwen. Now, I could see her clearly through its perimeter, sitting on the floor of my motel room and rifling hungrily through my wallet. She pulled out a thick wad of cash, all I had left to my name and stuffed it into her pants pocket. Then, she walked away, each click-clack of her shoes piercing an everlasting hole in my heart. It was something worse than death. As a matter of fact, it was my worst fear realized. She left the door just ajar; a sliver of the world where I ceased to belong. She did not look back.

 

I’m sorry, Gwen. Everything they say I did to you is true.